Sat nav stupidity and mapping Wales

The pictures are amazing (courtesy of the Daily Mail), but the story is dumb as!

A white van man, naturally, blindly follows his sat-nav off the main road in Switzerland and ends up stuck on what the emergency services described as a “glorified goat track”.

With no way to turn around the hapless delivery driver was forced to phone the emergency services and scream for help (we don’t know for sure that he was screaming, but it all adds to the imagery). They in turn had to send a heavy duty helicopter to air-lift him off the mountain side near Burgen.

The red-faced white van man told police, “I was lost and I kept hoping that each little turn would get me back to the main road. In the end [my sat nav] told me to turn around but of course I couldn't by then.”

Well,d’uh!

I have to say, while holidaying in Wales recently, on requesting a route to the nearest petrol station, my own sat nav took me down lanes which were little more than farm tracks; you needed a serious 4x4 to get up and down them and heaven forbid if you met a tractor coming the other way. One time I had to reverse for a quarter of a mile almost while the farmer crept towards me eating a sandwich.

But hey, I’m smart, after that little jaunt I took to consulting this strange piece of paper called a MAP! I stuck to the main roads and when my virtual-navigator kept saying “Turn right at the end of the road” I would just look up the 20% gradient, single lane track and say “uh uh, no way!”

image © bzo via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence